The Embassy of Portugal in Thailand, the Portuguese Cultural Center in Bangkok in partnership with WTF Gallery are delighted to invite you to the solo show “More Or Less“ by MAISMENOS (Miguel Januário) at WTF Gallery. The opening reception will be held on Friday 14 December 2018, 7pm at WTF Gallery.

The concept of art “intervention” suggests breaking down the fixed and known into particles of the unknown from which a new public consciousness may emerge. Grass-roots interaction exploits the city as site and medium for critique. Art interventions in urban spaces are of many kinds, which collectively symbolize how many different ways there are of understanding, visualizing and materializing the issues of society. They are all intended as agents of change that operate or exist to subvert, resist and continually destabilize the tangible, fixed and known perceptions of public spaces.

In Thailand, art intervention is a relatively new phenomenon, often carried out clandestinely by shadowy collectives who respond provocatively and fleetingly with micro-actions to the systems and structures of control and knowledge, for example with the street stencil works of Black Panther and Watch using the faces of Thailand’s leaders to subject them to often comical critiques.

More or Less exhibition showcases MAISMENOS//MIGUEL Januário’s works to Thai audiences to show up remarkable parallels in the practices of Thai and Portuguese street artists and the obstacles they resist: constraint of freedom of media, nationalism, the over-exercise of authority and the fragility of democracy. The artist intends to showcase the manifestations of art intervention in urban spaces between the two countries.

±MaisMenos± is a project by Portuguese visual artist and graphic designer Miguel Januário (b. 1981) that began as an academic thesis in 2005 and later took on a life of its own. It offers a critical reflection rather than a model of political, social and economic organisation inherent to contemporary urban societies. Conducting a clinical dissection of reality that plays with the dualities intrinsic to the Western Ideological edifice, the project’s programmatic expression is reduced to the greatest possible simplicity and seemingly mutually exclusive opposites: more/less, positive/negative, black/white.

Under the ±MaisMenos± banner, Januário has been producing thought-provoking, cutting-edge work both indoors and outdoors in a variety of media – from video to sculptural installations, from painting to performance. Besides numerous illegal public art intervention in several countries, the project has also been showcased in solemn solo and group exhibitions in various institutional contexts, including at Vera Cortes Gallery (Lisbon, 2010), MACE-Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Elvas (Elvas, 2011,2014), Underdogs Gallery (Lisbon, 2013,2014,2015), Caixa Cultural (Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Brasilia, 2014), Museu do Coa (Vila Nova de Foz Coa, 2015), Centro de Arte Contemporanea Graga Morais (Braganga, 2015), MUDE-Museu do Design e da Moda (Lisbon, 2016), MACRO-Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (Rome, 2016), and leading art festivals and events such as Walk &amp; Talk Festival (Sao Miguel, Azores, 2011), Guimaraes European Capital of Culture (Guimaraes, 2012), La Tour Paris13 (Paris, 2013), Nuart Festival (Stavanger, 2014), and Forgotten Project (Rome, 2016). ±MaisMemos± has also been the subject of two TED talks, at TEDxLuanda (Luanda, 2014) and TEDxPorto (Porto, 2015), and other public lectures. The project is also the focus of Miguel Januário’s ongoing PhD research at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto.